Atlantis, space station astronauts enjoy new view

SPACE CENTER, Houston {AP} Astronauts on the international space station have a great new view of their home planet, thanks to a successful spacewalk and a state-of-the-art window.

Spacewalkers Thomas Jones and Robert Curbeam Jr. attached an aluminum shutter Monday to a porthole on the Destiny science laboratory, which had been joined to space station Alpha two days earlier.

The porthole, the finest optical-quality window ever built into a spacecraft, needed the aluminum shutter for protection against micrometeorites. Before the shutter was installed, an insulating material had blocked the view through the window.

The shutter was attached two days early because Jones and Curbeam, astronauts from the space shuttle Atlantis, were ahead of schedule.

As soon as the shutter was in place, Alpha's residents cranked it open from inside the station. "It worked!" Curbeam called out.

Astronauts and cosmonauts will photograph and observe the Earth through the window, using high-powered cameras and telescopes.

The astronauts had a relatively light agenda for Tuesday, when the Atlantis crew planned to fire the shuttle's steering jets to boost the station and shuttle's altitude. The mission's third and final spacewalk was slated for Wednesday.

During Monday's spacewalk, Jones and Curbeam also wired up a shuttle docking port on the end of the $1.4 billion Destiny laboratory, considered the centerpiece of the orbiting complex.

Astronaut Marsha Ivins, the shuttle robot-arm operator, performed the bulk of the work in attaching the docking port. The port had been moved to make way for Destiny when the lab was mounted onto Alpha.

As the spacewalkers toiled outside Destiny, work went on inside to get the lab up and running. Station commander Bill Shepherd and his two Russian crewmates confirmed Monday that all the exterior connections were good.

The astronauts briefly paused from their work to hear some good news from Mission Control: the NEAR spacecraft had landed on the asteroid Eros and was sending back signals.

"I hope we'll have some astronauts following to the asteroids in just a few years," said Jones, a planetary scientist.